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It’s here! It’s here! Winnipeg can now be stalked seen from afar the way we Winnipeggers see it ourselves as we walk its alternately sand/gravel/ice covered sidewalks.

The first sightings of the Google Street View camera car were reported early in the spring. This was disappointing to me and many others because, frankly, the city looks like crap in the spring. Not only are the trees grey and leafless (absent of the beautiful winter accoutrements of snow and hoarfrost), but the boulevards are strewn with the debris left by receding snowbanks. It’s not a pretty time.

Fortunately, it seems that the Google team stuck around long enough for parts of the town to be photographed in their full, leafy glory.

It looks like they worked their way inward — outlying neighbourhoods weren’t so lucky. That said, Riverview looks not unbecoming in this shot:

This isn’t quite breaking news — I remember reading about this earlier in the year — but Racialicious had a post on it this week, spurred by a current gallery exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Dulce Pinzón took photographs of Mexican workers in superhero costumes. A window-washer is Spider-man; a laudromat worker is Wonder Woman. Here is her artist’s statement:

After September 11, the notion of the “hero” began to rear its head in the public consciousness more and more frequently. The notion served a necessity in a time of national and global crisis to acknowledge those who showed extraordinary courage or determination in the face of danger, sometimes even sacrificing their lives in an attempt to save others. However, in the whirlwind of journalism surrounding these deservedly front-page disasters and emergencies, it is easy to take for granted the heroes who sacrifice immeasurable life and labor in their day to day lives for the good of others, but do so in a somewhat less spectacular setting.

The Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed. It is common for a Mexican worker in New York to work extraordinary hours in extreme conditions for very low wages which are saved at great cost and sacrifice and sent to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive.

The Mexican economy has quietly become dependent on the money sent from workers in the US. Conversely, the US economy has quietly become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it is the quietness of this dependence which makes Mexican immigrant workers a subject of interest.

The principal objective of this series is to pay homage to these brave and determined men and women that somehow manage, without the help of any supernatural power, to withstand extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper.

This project consists of 20 color photographs of Mexican and Latino immigrants dressed in the costumes of popular American and Mexican superheroes. Each photo pictures the worker/superhero in their work environment, and is accompanied by a short text including the worker’s name, their hometown, the number of years they have been working in New York, and the amount of money they send to their families each week.

What struck me most was the sheer amounts of money these individuals sent home to their families. Noe Reyes, the Superman/Delivery Boy above, sends $500 a week. That’s $2000 a month — a staggering amount that doesn’t even include his own living expenses in a very costly city (or, at least, metropolitan area).

This kind of “quiet economic interdependence” is not unique to the relationship between New York City and Mexico. You have African traders in China bringing consumer goods back to the Continent (though given the size of China’s economy, it’s not quite the same kind of interdependence). And here in Canada, I think primarily of the Filipino community. Particularly in the western provinces (Alberta, B.C.) Filipina women come to work as nannies and housekeepers, sending large proportions of their earnings back home. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a local business owner who comes from the Phillipines. She runs a  successful commercial baking operation that services Winnipeg’s large Filipino population (as well as people like me who have a taste for delicacies like ube roll cakes). She told me about how she had just sent half a dozen computer systems back to her sister in the Philipines so her sister could open an internet/computer café where users could pay per hour to use the computers (apparently, Filipino students are expected to hand in typed assignments, but few families own their own computers).

I encourage you to check out the entire series of photographs, in which Pinzón makes visible the “invisible” workers of NYC.

Photo by Hannah Whittaker (via BOOOOOOOM!)

The stillness of the water and the coniferous forest on the opposing shore in this photo send my mind straight to Manitoba’s cottage country (though, for my purposes, I ignore what appears to be a small mountain/hill in the top left quadrant of the photo).

For me, cottage country = the Whiteshell and surrounding provincial parks like Nopiming. Of course, that’s not the only place in Manitoba where people keep their summer abodes, from the small, simple cabins in Wasagaming in Riding Mountain National Park to the rambling mid-century structures in Grand Beach.

This coming weekend, the plan is that my friends an I will decamp to Ruth’s parents’ cottage (the location of which I forget, frankly. It’s not important, anyway, since I won’t be driving there. Unlike that one time in college when Erin, Gillian and I struggled to find Lynsay’s Grand Beach-area cottage without a printed version of the emailed instructions. Also it was nighttime. We found our way there eventually, but not before using a few more litres of gasoline than was strictly necessary had we been better prepared).

Anyhow, back to the photo you see above. The flame burning counterintuitively on the water doesn’t seem that strange, for some reason, once you’ve spent an evening lakeside by the fire, preferably at an isolated waterfront cottage, at sunset once the motorboats and Seadoos have been put away for the night. Ideally, a loon will call the lake home, and you’ll hear its eerie call echoing off the water’s surface. (I idealize only the loon’s signature call, here; did you know that loons have been observe hunting smaller birds for pleasure? As in, killing wantonly with gusto and not for the purpose of procuring a meal? Strange but true…)

In the early evening haze of dusk, a campfire can mesmerize, can bend reality, not unlike Hannah Whittaker’s photograph. There’s something mystical about The Lake, as Manitobans call it, and maybe that’s one reason that the city empties out in the summer months, its inhabitants drawn away to the nighttime stillness and the lakeside flame.

My friend Kandise has recently undertaken a new venture. She’s a librarian by training and trade, but she is also a talented and skilled photographer. She’s started up a photography company called Hibou Photo. If you live in or around Fredricton, New Brunswick, you can get her to take a rad portrait of you or perhaps your wedding photos.

For non-Canadians/non-francophones, “Hibou” is the French word for “owl.”

Check out some of Kandise’s lovely, lovely work:

I suppose I do have some sort of appreciation for minimalist and/or spartan homes. Ones with lots of blank spaces, clean surfaces and carefully selected decoration, if any. But those kinds of interiors are not really the ones I’d want to create for myself. Some people find lots of visual stimulation in their environments overwhelming; what I love about my home is that I can look up from basically any place I’m sitting or standing and rest my eyes on something colourful, something textural, something interesting to comfort and inspire me.

I’ve really been enjoying visiting The Selby, a collection of photographer Todd Selby’s captures of the urban homes of various artist and musician types. Not all of the interiors he photographs are to my personal taste, naturally (especially not the ones characterized by what I call “Dead Animal Aesthetic”), but the ones that are resonate. The photo above is from the home of Christina and Swaim Hutson, and while I don’t have a glorious collection of vintage suitcases like they do, I do have a similar thing going in my place where I stack up second-hand wicker picnic baskets for storage.

These photographs remind me that you should really do whatever the hell you want with your home, no matter how much design mags and books tell you to clear away clutter on the walls and get rid of your knick-knacks.